Date of Submission

Spring 2022

Academic Program

Biology

Project Advisor 1

Michael Tibbetts

Abstract/Artist's Statement

Over the last century global plastic production has grown substantially. Plastics are a ubiquitous material in industry and daily life. With that production and usage, plastic pollution has also increased. The purpose of this experiment was to examine the effects of microplastics on Danio rerio embryos. The specific aim of this study was to determine whether the chorion has any effect on embryo mortality rates, or microplastic localization, in the presence of three sizes of microplastics. Microplastics of all sizes, in both chorionated and dechorionated embryos, accumulated at the perimeter of the yolk sac of the zebrafish embryos. Statistical analyses on the mortality data revealed that size of microplastic has no effect on the mortality rates of the zebrafish embryos; analyses did reveal that the presence of a chorion has a significant effect on zebrafish embryo mortality rates in each microplastic size group. Implications of these findings suggest that the chorion has an effect on the mortality rates of zebrafish embryos in the presence of microplastics—i.e. the chorion may offer the embryo protection from microplastics.

Open Access Agreement

On-Campus only

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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